Empowering Girls & Women through Adverts?

Today I came across another empowering advert for women and girls. It seems that the trend is growing year by year with more and more brands jumping on the bandwagon.

Some people criticise the trend by labelling companies as hypocrite (“they are trying to sell beauty products/wax and raisors to shave our bodies after all!”). But isn’t wonderful to see this type of empowering messages promoted by adverts instead of the usual “fix yourself -be this or that” stuff?

At the very least these adverts diversify the range of images and role models available to girls and from my point of view this could be the start of a gradual change taking place…if we start to reward the companies sending this type of messages instead of criticising them under the “hypocrisy label”, more and more of them will follow and the entire advertising landscape could gradually transform into something more real and inspiring than the fake beauty images currently surrounding us: it makes perfect sense.

Check out the full playlist of empowering adverts here and don’t forget to comment!

 

Our You Tube video reaching 6000+ views in one day!

You Tube video girls asking I am pretty or ugly

I’ve decided to make a video collage from bits of the PoU clips in You Tube (yes..very time consuming I know…) hoping to raise awareness of the issue.

The video reached 2000+ views in the space of just a few hours thanks to retweeting and other sharing on social media platforms. I woke up this morning and saw the viewers count at 6000+ : I am amazed!

Even if the funds in Indiegogo are not growing as fast as I wish (I know that without a specific selling point or product to show/pre-buy crowdfunding is notoriously difficult!) I remain optimistic in the power of collective awakening about these issues and the many emails received from supporters along with the growing number of subscriptions to the channel are something which really spurs me to do more.

I would like to publicily thank all the lovely supporters who have written their emails: I hope you will all appreciate that I won’t have the time to reply to each one of you as I am still managing things mostly on my own (will be soon recruiting a team of volunteers so get in touch if you wish to help!) and need to prioritise the writing up of my thesis at this stage 😉

Please keep sharing and don’t forget to subscribe to the blog to keep up to date with our progress and receive new blog posts directly in your email box.

Update Feb 2014: the video was removed by You Tube after I started a petition to remove or disable abusive comments. The visitors count was reaching 134,000 in one week due to Upworthy contribution.  I think this shows how much profits can get in the way of ethical conduct. You can still watch the video in Vimeo:

Â